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From: jerry@ORA.ORA.COM (Jerry Peek)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.mh
Subject: Re: Using { pick, scan, search } on multiple folders
Message-ID: <m0jKWkd-00009zC@ora.ora.com>
Date: 24 Mar 91 15:12:00 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 36

On 22 Mar 91 14:58:55 GMT, Walter Lamia <wml@sei.cmu.edu> wrote:
> I would like to use the `search' (which uses `pick' command, right?) to find
> messages in multiple folders, particularly with the -after switch, so I can
> find all the messages that I filed recently, in any of my folders.

This sounds like a job for a shell loop.  You can type it at a shell
prompt on your terminal.  You don't say what you want to do with the
messages you find, so let's store them in a sequence named "picked"
in each folder... that way, MH will remember what messages you found in
each folder.  Here are examples for both the Bourne/Korn and C shells.
If you have sub-folders, add "-recurse" to each "folders" command:

      SH/KSH                                   CSH
$ for f in `folders -fast`             % foreach f (`folders -fast`)
> do pick +$f -after xxx -seq picked   ? pick +$f -after xxx -seq picked
> done                                 ? end

Now let's get a little fancier and scan the messages you found in each
folder, too -- but only if pick found some messages that match.  To
do that, test pick's exit status and only scan when it's zero:

$ for f in `folders -fast`          % foreach f (`folders -fast`)
> do                                ? if ({ pick +$f -af xxx -seq picked }) then
>  if pick +$f -af xxx -seq picked  ?   echo ====== $f ======
>  then                             ?   scan picked
>    echo ====== $f ======          ? endif
>    scan picked                    ? end
>  fi
> done

Finally, to make "pick" quiet (not print "1 hit" or "No messages match
specification"), just redirect its standard output and standard error:

     pick .... > /dev/null 2>&1           pick ... >& /dev/null

--Jerry Peek, jerry@ora.com, uunet!ora!jerry